Entheogens and the Future of Religion

INTRODUCTION

Robert Forte

Robert Forte, an independent scholar of entheogens, psychology, and religion, also edited Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In (Park Street Press 1999) and the thirtieth anniversary edition of The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (North Atlantic Books 2008). A former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, he teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies and is studying the effects of cannabis, ayahuasca, and other natural medicines on cancer. http://ciis.academia.edu/RobertForte.

THE TERM ENTHEOGEN was introduced into the English language in 1979 to refer to plants or chemical substances that awaken or generate mystical experiences (Ruck et al. 1979). It is used here in the spirit of its conception to distinguish the religious nature of these substances and the experiences they evoke from their effects in other contexts, for which there are other terms, psychedelic or hallucinogen. Once, when a journalist casually referred to peyote (a classic entheogen) as a drug, a Huichol Indian shaman replied, Aspirin is a drug, peyote is sacred.

We live in a time when a great many voices are calling for a spiritual renewal to help us address some of the problems that face humanity. The great spiritual theologian Matthew Fox is one such voice. He wrote, At a National Academy of Sciences conference in 1986 exploring the mass extinction of plants and animals on our planet, Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University declared, ‘Scientific analysis points, curiously, toward the need for a quasi-religious transformation of contemporary cultures’ (Fox 1988, 2).

Yet the way of the entheogens—one of the oldest and most widespread means of attaining a religious experience—is forbidden, surrounded by a miasma of controversy and misunderstanding. This problem was further complicated during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s by a war on drugs waged to eradicate the illicit, recreational, non-medical abuse of drugs. Entheogens have been swept up in this official anti-drug crusade even though they differ considerably from, and do not rank highly among, drugs of abuse. In fact, these substances, when used in a context to educe spiritual awareness, have been used with some success to alleviate addictions to narcotic drugs and alcohol. No less an authority than William G. Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, observed, Though LSD and some kindred alkaloids have had an amazingly bad press, there seems to be no doubt of their immense and growing value (Forte 1999, 244).

This is one of the most mysterious and important subjects in all religious history. Entheogens have figured prominently in the mystical practices of some of the world’s greatest civilizations. They have been widely employed in shamanic societies, and their use continues today throughout the world. They alter consciousness in such a profound way that, depending on the set and setting, their effects can range from states resembling psychosis to what are perhaps the ultimate human experiences: union with God or revelation of other mystical realities. Though they affect the psyche so powerfully, entheogens are among the biologically safest drugs known.

At the present time, nearly all the entheogens are listed in the Controlled Substance Act of the United States as having no medical use and a high potential for abuse and are thereby subject to the most stringent controls. Criminal penalties punish unsanctioned use—and virtually no use is sanctioned. Though it is technically possible for medical research proposals to be approved by the government, the process of applying for permission is long, expensive, and for researchers with temporal and fiscal constraints, prohibitive. In a survey of former psychedelic researchers, the late Walter Houston Clark, professor emeritus of the psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, found that governmental red tape was the primary reason why they had ceased working in this field. It would seem that something is wrong if qualified investigators find it so difficult to obtain funds and permission to work in an area that most feel will open important doors to the future of humanity (Clark 1975, 15).

To some extent this problem can be attributed to the behavior of Timothy Leary (1920–1996), who took it upon himself to be a cheerleader for the cause of psychedelics—against the wishes of some of his colleagues at the time. Among them, Frank Barron, Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and others felt that these materials were sacred and urged that they be treated with discretion and respect as was accorded the sacrament at Eleusis, alchemical elixirs, and the like. Unwilling or unable to contain his enthusiasm, Leary popularized psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and identified them as catalysts of a revolutionary social movement. He encouraged their use in ways that were seen as (and often were) hedonistic, irresponsible, or radically threatening to the status quo, thereby provoking the restrictive legislation we see today.

But psychedelic drug prohibition existed long before Leary. A persistent and often violent repression of entheogens commonly occurred when they were encountered by European colonialists in their conquest of the New World, to such an extent that they might have been lost for all time. Were it not for the painstaking research of Valentina and Gordon Wasson, the serendipitous discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1938, and Aldous Huxley’s description of his mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception in 1954, this repression may have succeeded entirely. Leary’s efforts assured that entheogens would not be forgotten again anytime soon. Millions were inspired by his zeal to explore these remarkable materials, and as a result, some of the leading minds of the ’60s generation were enriched by them. The 1993 Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis has gone so far as to say, I think I might have been stupid in some respects, if it weren’t for my psychedelic experiences (Mullis 1995).

However, the sudden impact of entheogens upon a predominantly secular and materialistic society left no time for the appropriate educational, religious, or medical agencies to understand or accommodate their effects. Laws designed to protect citizens were counterproductive. They effectively curtailed professional research while having the opposite effect on an underground society. The result is that many otherwise law-abiding citizens continue to use these substances in secret for fear of prosecution. The dangers of the entheogens are exaggerated by ignorance, and their potential virtues remain hidden.

Direct experience of the divine is a goal of spiritual seekers everywhere. But without the proper framework to understand mystical experience, even glorious encounters with the divine can be problematic or confusing. By contrast, difficult experiences that occur within the context of a religious model can be valuable and transformative. In societies where ecstatic experiences are successfully integrated, it is because a suitable framework exists to define or structure them. Mircea Eliade considers this an essential element in understanding ecstasy.

. . . we must keep in mind the two essential elements of the problem: on the one hand, the ecstatic experience as a primary phenomenon; on the other, the historico-religious milieu into which this ecstatic experience was destined to be incorporated and the ideology that, in the last analysis, was to validate it. We have termed the ecstatic experience a primary phenomenon because we see no reason whatever for regarding it as the result of a particular historical moment. Rather we would consider it as fundamental in the human condition, and hence known to the whole of archaic humanity; what changed and was modified with the different forms of culture and religion was the interpretation and evaluation of the ecstatic experience. (Eliade 1964, 504)

Unfortunately today the interpretation and evaluation of the entheogenic ecstatic experience have been determined exclusively by a medical-psychiatric paradigm that generally is not oriented toward appreciating mystical states of consciousness. This paradigm problem has been vigorously enunciated by Stanislav Grof, M.D., who, after twenty-five years of research, concluded that neither the nature of the LSD experience nor the numerous observations made in the course of psychedelic therapy can be adequately explained in terms of the Newtonian-Cartesian, mechanistic approach to the universe (Grof 1985, 31). And, as Daniel X. Freedman, M.D., president of the American Psychiatric Association, said in 1983 when asked about the possibility of resuming research into the therapeutic effectiveness of psychedelics, Psychedelic drugs have not demonstrated sufficient relevance to the health service concerns of the psychiatric profession; but this is the most interesting subject I have encountered in all my years of science. Religion, that’s the field for them (Freedman 1983). It seems right then to turn to other disciplines, mainly religion—but also to psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, and art—to explore their value.

These writings aim to direct attention to the distinctly sacred nature of these substances with the hope that religious-minded investigators, policy architects, and the concerned public will take note. It is our hope that this book will contribute to an honest reappraisal of the historic and modern significance of entheogens so that they may be used accordingly in today’s world by those seeking to cultivate their spiritual awareness.

Since this book was first published by the Council on Spiritual Practices in 1997, we’ve seen many positive changes in the world of entheogens, as Robert Jesse describes in his foreword to this new edition. At the same time it must be said that monumental changes, not for the better, have occurred in contemporary American society and throughout the world.

The environmental crisis, urgent at the time of our first publication, has worsened.  Politically, there have been sweeping changes that have undermined the democracy of the United States, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Wolf 2007; www.globalresearch.ca). Although a great many of the world’s most prominent government officials, military officers, scientists, and philosophers present strong evidence that 9/11 has not been legally adjudicated and that the official story is preposterously false,  nonetheless the attacks are used to justify the longest, most destructive, and most expensive wars in U.S. history, which at present show no sign of abating (Griffin 2011). Indeed it seems, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, we have entered a period of endless war. Largely as a result of these wars, at the time of this writing, the world stands on the precipice of a global economic collapse, worse than the Great Depression (www.rawstory.com/rs/2011).

Yet, crisis may equal opportunity. Many contributors to this volume describe how the intelligent use of entheogens could inspire peaceful, sustainable responses to the catastrophic state of modern society. The plot is thickening. Can the human species reverse these unfortunate developments of modernity?

Don’t speak too soon, for the wheels are still spinning.

When the Waters Were Changed

Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character. On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water. When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

At first, he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

A NINTH-CENTURY SUFI TALE

REFERENCES

Can Religion Save Us? www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j23/smith.asp?page=2.

Clark, W. H. Psychedelic Research: Obstacles and Values. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 15 (3) (1975).

Eliade, M. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Series, 1964.

Forte, R. Timothy Leary, Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, Reminiscences. Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 1999.

Fox, M. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988.

Freedman, D. X. Personal communication. 1983.

Griffin, David Ray. 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes against Democracy Succeed. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2011.

Grof, S. Beyond the Brain. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1985.

Mullis, K. Quotation in MAPS Bulletin 5 (3) (1995): 53.

Ruck, C. A. P., et al. Entheogens. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11 (1–2) (1979): 145–46.

Scott, Peter Dale. Supplanting the United States Constitution: War, National Emergency, and Continuity of Government, www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?article/d=19238.

Webster, Stephen C., IMF Adviser: The Global Ecomony Could Collapse in Two Weeks to Three Weeks. www.rawstory.com.

Wolf, Naomi. The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007.

1

TESTIMONY OF THE COUNCIL ON SPIRITUAL PRACTICES

Robert Jesse

Robert Jesse, convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practices, was trained in engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He has worked in software development as an independent consultant and in several capacities for Oracle Corporation, most recently as a vice president for business development. In 1994 Bob began a leave of absence from Oracle to devote himself to the council’s work. Since 1997 he has advanced scientific studies and coauthored papers on the psychospiritual effects of psilocybin.

To us in the Southwest, this freedom of religion has singular significance because it affects diverse cultures. It is as much of us as the rain on our hair, the wind on the grass, and the sun on our faces. It is so naturally a part of us that when the joy of this beautiful freedom sings in our souls, we find it hard to conceive that it could ever be imperiled. Yet, today, in this land of bright blue skies and yellow grass, of dusty prairies and beautiful mesas, and vistas of red earth with walls of weathered rock, eroded by oceans of time, the free spirit of the individual once again is threatened. . . .

CHIEF JUDGE BURCIAGA, UNITED STATES V. BOYLL, U.S. DISTRICT COURT, D.N.M., SEPTEMBER 3, 1991

An earlier version of this essay was presented to the Committee on Drugs and the Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on October 10, 1995.

THE COUNCIL ON SPIRITUAL PRACTICES is concerned primarily with religious experience and only secondarily with plants and chemicals or policies toward them. The drug laws, by contrast, and the agencies that enforce them, are concerned mostly with the substances and little with the religious uses to which some are put. I invite you to consider the impact that the drug laws inadvertently have on the free exercise of religion, affecting people for whom certain prohibited substances are an essential feature of their spiritual practices. That impact effectively constitutes religious persecution, even though most of the people conducting it have no desire to persecute and no idea that they are doing so.

THE ENTHEOGENS

The substances of interest here are those known in the medical community as hallucinogens and elsewhere as the psychedelics. These drugs are sharply dissimilar from drugs such as cocaine and heroin; several of them have been shown to be very low in addiction potential and overdose risk (Gable 1993) and to be of very low organic toxicity. The risks of injurious behavior and of psychological harm from the altered-consciousness experience, which are not negligible in unsupervised casual use, appear to be minimized when they are used in ritual settings (Cohen 1960; Bergman 1971; Strassman 1984). It is the ability of these substances to catalyze religious experience that is of interest to CSP; to emphasize this, we use the word entheogen, coined from Greek roots signifying to realize the divine within (Ott 1993, 103–5), to describe them when used for spiritual purposes.

For as long as we know of, there have been at least a few people in every culture, the mystics and the saints, who were able through prayer, meditation, or other techniques to bring upon themselves mystical states of consciousness (James 1958), also called primary religious experience. In some cultures, this direct experience of the sacred was available to everyone, or to members of special bodies of initiates, through the sacramental use of psychoactive plants and preparations. There is now substantial evidence that the Eleusinian Mystery rites, performed annually near Athens for almost two thousand years, featured a mystical revelation brought on by the drinking of an entheogenic brew (Wasson, Ruck, and Hofmann 1978). The Sanskrit Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious texts known, praises a mind-altering substance called soma, which Wasson (1968) identified as the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria. Both in the New World and in the Old, ritual use has long been made of another class of entheogenic mushrooms: those containing psilocybin. In Mesoamerica, the entheogenic cactus peyote was used in spiritual practices as early as 300 B.C.E. To this day, indigenous peoples in Russia, Africa, Mexico, South America, and North America, including an estimated 250,000 to 400,000 American Indians in the United States (Franklin and Patchen 1994), use a variety of psychoactive sacraments classified as Schedule I controlled substances in the United States. I will return to the Native Americans presently.

Over the last century, as Western ethnobotanists rediscovered some of the traditional sacramental substances and as chemists isolated their active principles, this knowledge slowly circulated among the intelligentsia. Aldous Huxley took mescaline, the principal psychoactive component of peyote, in 1953 and described his awakening experience in The Doors of Perception. By that time, another wave had been set in motion. In 1943, Albert Hofmann (1983) discovered the psychoactivity of LSD. Within a few decades, potent chemical means for facilitating primary religious experience were within easy reach of many people. It must be acknowledged that probably most contemporary users of hallucinogens take them with no explicit ritual surround or spiritual intention, though even then, the fire from heaven has been known to descend unbidden.

The religious import of the entheogens is confirmed in accounts by and of religious leaders and members of traditional entheogen-using cultures (Furst 1972, 1976; Schultes and Hofmann 1979; Dobkin de Rios 1984). This spiritual significance is corroborated by the accounts of scores of Western authorities (Metzner 1968; Roberts and Hruby 1995), including physician and church founder John Aiken (1970); Walter Houston Clark (1969), professor of psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary; Harvard theologian Harvey Cox (1977); retired MIT philosopher and scholar of comparative religion Huston Smith (1964, 1992); Jesuit scholar David Toolan (1987); and David M. Wulff, professor of psychology of religion at Wheaton College (1991). A landmark scientific study, the Good Friday Experiment conducted under the sponsorship of Harvard University by physician and minister Walter Pahnke in 1962, also strongly supports the thesis that the entheogens facilitate mystical consciousness and are compatible with Christian worship (Pahnke 1963; Pahnke and Richards 1969; Doblin 1991).

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

In the religious persecutions of the European early modern age, whether the struggle was Catholic against Lutheran, Calvinist against Anabaptist, or Anglican against Unitarian, the central issues tended to concern the efficacy of various sacraments. The same issue has resurfaced in the suppression of entheogenic practices. It is not surprising that people take very seriously disagreements about what can actually bring them closer to the divine. But Americans decided two centuries ago that such arguments are too important to be settled by force or by majority vote (Madison 1787). They are best left to the decisions of spiritual communities or to the individual conscience.

The First Amendment to the Constitution and a variety of statutes, administrative practices, and judicial decisions all protect religious freedom in this country. The fundamental principles of that corpus of law are that 1) the state may not treat any particular religion preferentially and that 2) you can live your religious life pretty much as you choose so long as you don’t infringe the rights of others or interfere too much with essential public interests.

The entheogens present a complex problem for those who want to make good on our nation’s promise of religious liberty. The classical form of religious persecution involves banning certain activities expressly because of their religious intent or content. That kind of persecution is relatively easy to identify and remedy. With entheogens, the present burden on religion comes in the form of a general ban on substances that are sometimes used spiritually and sometimes not. To relieve the burden, an exemption must be granted from the laws of general applicability that impose the burden.

NATIVE AMERICAN USE OF PEYOTE

This complex problem has been thoroughly explored in the instance of the Native American sacramental use of peyote. As the peyote religion spread among tribes in the United States in the late 1800s, it was met with explicit government persecution in the form of rules forbidding Indian use of peyote and, for example, old heathenish dances. Since then, numerous contradictory federal and state legislative, regulatory, enforcement, and court actions have variously supported and denied Indian use of peyote (Peregoy, Echo-Hawk, and Botsford 1995).

The most prominent failure to accommodate this religious practice was the 1990 Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith, which ruled that the First Amendment does not protect the use of peyote by Native Americans. The court reached its decision by changing prior standards to make it much harder to get relief from laws of general applicability that burden religious activity. A broad coalition of religious bodies responded swiftly by advocating new federal legislation, leading to the enactment of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (PL 103–141; Carmella 1995). Finally, in 1994, the federal